How to Use the Posts Table Pro WordPress Audio Playlist Plugin

Published on: April 15, 2018
Updated: August 29, 2018

Need a WordPress audio playlist plugin to make it easy for your visitors to listen to audio content at your WordPress site? In this post, we’ll show you how to use the Posts Table Pro WordPress audio playlist plugin to create two different styles of audio playlists on your WordPress site.

A WordPress audio playlist plugin is a great solution for:

Podcasts – you can display all your latest episodes in one easy-to-navigate playlist.

Music – visitors can choose between different tracks. Or, you can include multiple playlists on a single page.

Step 1: Create a custom post type to store audio files

While you can create an audio playlist from audio files that you add to regular WordPress posts and pages, creating a dedicated custom post type for your audio files makes it much easier to stay organized.

It also only takes a few seconds and doesn’t require any code. To create your custom post type, the free Pods plugin does a great job.

We recommend naming it something easy to remember, like “audio”. But the actual name isn’t super important!

Optionally, if you want to include extra information about each track, you should also use Pods to create some relevant custom fields. Beyond that, you can also enable Excerpts in the Advanced Options tab in Pods if you want to display a text description alongside each track’s title.

Step 2: Add the audio files that you want to include in your playlist

Now that you’ve created a custom post type to house your audio tracks, you’re ready to actually add the audio tracks that you want to use in your playlist.

You can do this in two different ways:

Add a single track to each post – this will display each audio track as a separate item in your table. This is what you’ll want to do most of the time.

Use the core WordPress playlist functionality – this essentially lets you create a “playlist of playlists”. For example, you could use this to list multiple albums or multiple podcast series on a single page.

Step 3: Use the Posts Table Pro plugin to create your playlist

Once you’ve added your audio files using one of the methods above, you’re ready to actually display your playlist on the frontend of your site using the Posts Table Pro shortcode. You can add this shortcode to a regular WordPress post or page.

The base shortcode looks something like this:

[posts_table post_type="audio"]

Where “audio” is the actual slug for the custom post type that you created.

To make your table look like a playlist, though, you’ll want to add some additional shortcode parameters.

And if you opt for the “playlist of playlists” approach, it might look a little more like this:

How to change the style of the audio player

If you don’t like how the core WordPress audio player looks or functions, Posts Table Pro is compatible with many other audio player plugins to allow you to customize how your audio playlist functions.

Some good options are:

mb.miniAudioPlayer – more minimalist than the core player. It only expands when a user hits the play button.

Start using this WordPress audio playlist plugin today!

By using Posts Table Pro as a WordPress audio playlist plugin, you gain the ability to control exactly what information displays in your playlist, as well as how your visitors can interact with your playlist in terms of searching, filtering, pagination, and more. Visit the audio playlist plugin knowledge base to see all the options and how to use them.

Whether you’re creating a playlist of individual audio tracks or a “playlist of playlists”, Posts Table Pro can help you get the job done.